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Jazz as a parenting style

February 2, 2016by admin

After rolling my eyes at yet another article criticizing modern parents for being indulgent with their children, I was happy to come across this article from the NYTimes that fit my own parenting philosophy rather better, How to Raise a Creative Child: Step One – Back Off! And the ideas in it struck me as particularly well suited to jazz parents.

We moved from Holland to New Zealand and finally to Canada all before I was four!

I consider my own parents to have been jazz parents even though neither of them played an instrument or sang. But the house was filled with music at all times and my mother was quick to embrace notions of following one’s intuition, expressing oneself, and being true to your artistic nature. My father once told me it was more important to him that I sing at a well-respected jazz club than finish my university degree. To be honest, it is something he denies now with a kind of puzzled “really? I said that?” but it did impress me at the time. And yeah, I did sing at that club so …

Posing on the Champs Elysées in Paris

My own children are jazz kids, kids who have grown up around a philosophy of freedom, creativity, adapting and improvising that colours their everyday experiences. Sudden change of plans? Just quickly switch gears and make up something new! Dad’s on tour? Everyone helps cook! When faced with more formal ideas of parenting by, oh, say French or German mothers I would tend to describe my own attitude as “very, very North American” and wave my hand around wildly in the air, perhaps to show how I was erasing a lot of rules. Some parts of attachment parenting appealed to me but that didn’t mean much to them either. It strikes me now that what I was trying to express something more along the lines of jazz parenting.

A jazz parent has the advantage of being unfazed by being woken in the night by a newborn as they are often coming and going from the house at such hours anyway; of being able to let them jam on musical instruments without any expensive music lessons; of being able to frighten their children off of drug use with real-life tales eg. “he was thirty but he looked eighty and then he DIED”; of coping with sudden changes in schedule eg. “we’re all in quarantine now!” with a certain laid-back attitude.

We were, however, tormented by the tinned, staccato music of our children’s early baby toys and often resorted to keeping half empty batteries around so we could slow them down to soft, fading sounds. It made little sense to me that kids were supposed to like saccharine mechanical songs so we formed Bebop for Babies, because kids deserve hip music too. As small children our kids happily bounced on stage to join us for our Bebop for Babies concerts. We didn’t enforce stringent music lessons on them but let them play air guitar or rattle on a toy piano on stage as they wanted. We made a few mistakes along the way, like letting 300 school children line up to get JJ’s autograph at a music festival when he was about seven. The school bus drivers were furious with the delay. But we learned our lessons along the way. And doing early afternoon gigs suited me a lot better than late night jazz clubs with all the sophisticated grooming and expensive babysitting those required.

Now, as our sons get older and are faced with more pressing choices for their own futures, I hope they’ll continue along with the philosophy I embraced as a teen when I devoured Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society book and realized following one’s interest is the best motivator for learning. Another writer I happened upon recently that I feel some kinship with is Alfie Kohn and his book the Myth of the Spoiled Child. Because I just want to have fun with my family and enjoy our time together, instead of behaving like a drill sergeant or some kind of jailer. Supporting them while they make their own choices and find their own way, as our parents supported us, feels like the right thing to do, whatever you call it.